The People’s Republic of Chemicals

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Author Bio

William J. Kelly is a senior correspondent for California Energy Circuit. He is the co-author of Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles and the author of Home Safe Home. His reporting has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Consumers Digest, Inside Climate News, LA Weekly, and the California Journal, among other outlets. He was the chief spokesman of South Coast Air Quality Management District, the smog control agency for greater Los Angeles.

Chip Jacobs is the co-author of Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles and the author of The Vicodin Thieves, The Ascension of Jerry and Wheeler-Dealer. Jacobs' reporting has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, CNN, Bloomberg View, Daily News of Los Angeles, LA Weekly and newgeography.com, among others.

Maverick environmental writers William J. Kelly and Chip Jacobs follow up their acclaimed Smogtown with a provocative examination of China’s ecological calamity already imperiling a warming planet. Toxic smog most people figured was obsolete needlessly kills as many as died in the 9/11 attacks every day, while sometimes Grand Canyon-sized drifts of industrial particles aloft on the winds rain down ozone and waterway-poisoning mercury in America.

In vivid, gonzo prose blending first-person reportage with exhaustive research and a sense of karma, Kelly and Jacobs describe China’s ancient love affair with coal, Bill Clinton’s blunders cutting free-trade deals enabling the U.S. to "export" manufacturing emissions to Asia in a shift that pilloried the West's middle class, Communist Party manipulation of eco-statistics, the horror of cancer villages, the deception of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and spellbinding peasant revolts against cancer-spreading plants involving thousands in mostly-censored melées. Ending with China’s monumental coal-bases decried by climatologists as a global warming dagger, The People's Republic of Chemicals names names and emphasizes humanity over bloodless statistics in a classic sure to ruffle feathers as an indictment of money as the real green that not even Al Gore can deny. —Rare Bird Books, A Vireo Book